What does the Tunisian economy look like after five decades of economic liberalization and a revolution? This work looks at the social structure characterizing capital in Tunisia by focusing on production relations between members of the capitalist class. Taking an approach grounded in Marx's definition of capital "as not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society" and heterodox economic theories, it shows how the roll-back of the state after the short post-colonial socialist parenthesis of the 1960s, and the promotion of (neo-)liberal economic policies, capital ended up crystallized in a relatively stable network structure that shapes class solidarity between capitalists, the preservation of wealth and power within a small oligarchy with a core-periphery hierarchical structure. Following a mixed-methods approach, this study relies on an extensive empirical analysis of corporate networks in today's Tunisia to explore the anatomy of the dominant bourgeoisie. It confirms that capitalism does not follow the axioms of neoclassical economics that informed the “crony capitalism” literature where capitalists’ reliance on interpersonal connections is an anomaly specific to dictatorial regimes of the regime. It argues that social ties between elite business-owners play a critical role in facilitating cooperation and resource-pooling between capitalist class members. It concludes that, despite the continuous mobilization following the fall of the Ben Ali regime, the Tunisian revolution failed to get rid of the dominant oligarchy.

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. The process of decolonization, despite its imperfections, was undoubtedly one of the most significant turning points in recent history. The tide of peoples across the globe rising up to sweep away the structures of domination and subjugation to which they had been subjected for centuries constituted an unquestionably world altering force. This dynamic unlocked a wide range of new horizons and unleashed a plethora of emancipatory energies and liberatory political projects. Ranging from Pan-Africanism to Afro-Asianism, Third Worldism to Muslim Internationalism, Pan-Arabism to Tricontinentalism; peoples in the Global South rediscovered their voices and power and were not afraid to use them. A widespread conception of this history regards decolonization more as a point in time rather than a process. This misconception of historical time imagines categories such as colonial and postcolonial, colonized and independent, subjugated and sovereign as clear-cut categories, and mistakes their analytical function for their actual empirical distinctiveness. An a priori commitment to thinking about history and historical time in terms of brakes, ruptures and discontinuities may do more to distort than to clarify. Approaching institutions, systems and structures of power that have been developed over centuries as phenomena that have lives as well as afterlives may help us to demystify the seeming incomprehensibility of the contemporary human condition. It would be naive to think that the sovereignty of postcolonial states became absolute on the official day of their independence or to believe that former colonial powers simply dragged their tails of defeat back to Europe and forever closed the colonial chapter of their history and opened a new page in which their former colonial subjects are now both perceived and treated as equals. Using the Algerian revolutionary movement (Hirak) as a case study, this paper seeks to read the revolutionary movements that WANA region has witnessed over the last decade as the latest installment of a struggle between global anti-colonial forces, and a colonial counter-revolution. It examines the latest division of the counter-revolutionary labor, needed to reproduce the status quo, between Global, regional, and local actors, as well as the ways in which the popular movement’s analysis and strategy to countering them. The paper argues that such a framing sheds light on fields of power and resistance previously out of view and renders intelligible dynamics and attitudes whose seeming incomprehensibility has tended to keep them out of the story.

Scholarships on the 2010-2011 Tunisian revolution remain puzzled by the evaluation of this historical event in connection to the ongoing upheavals. Thus, the Tunisian revolution — or so-called Arab Spring — is either qualified as a success, or, it is deemed aborted and winterized, or, it is concluded that such evaluation would be premature since the revolution is still in progress. Ultimately, the analysis is trapped by the revolution/democratic transition dichotomy. This article proposes to overcome this unnecessary evaluation; and instead, to engage dialectically with the evolution of power struggles and the efforts of the subalterns to create new class alliances. This article converges the theoretical frameworks of Fanon’s national liberation and Gramsci’s hegemony, war on maneuver, and war on position to keep the focus on the decolonial struggle and its consequences. It proceeds by (1) determining theoretical concepts ; (2) retracing the colonial genealogies of the revolution (war on maneuver) and post-revolution struggles (war on position); (3) reevaluating the contextualizing the two-month Tunisian revolution as a war on maneuver and the post-revolution ‘transition’ as a war on position constantly reshaping class alliances to overcome political struggles as part of the enduring decolonial struggles; and (4) highlighting avenues for research that remain to be investigated.

On January 14th, the 10th anniversary of Tunisia’s 2010-2011 uprising, the Tunisian government used the pretext of the Covid-19 health crisis to impose another round of restrictive lockdown measures across the country, sparking the latest wave of what can be understood as a protracted struggle against colonial-capitalism. In addition to articulating persistent socio-economic demands, including calls to redistribute the wealth derived from the country’s natural resources and redress longstanding socio-spatial inequalities, these protests expressed a poignant critique of the police state; demanding not only a release of detained protesters but also a transformation of the security infrastructure that has long functioned to criminalize the working class and poor as well as discipline political dissent. Many analysts have turned to orientalist explanations that place the blame for the current display of state violence on a “return to authoritarian tendencies”, lamenting the implications of such violence for Tunisia’s nascent democracy and overlooking structural factors. This paper will instead provide a longue durée, political economy analysis of Tunisia’s security state, tracing its discursive and institutional roots to the colonial era, considering how its current imbrications in imperialist security architecture facilitate continued unequal exchange and wealth drain, and therefore can be seen as part of the colonial counter-revolution. The paper will concentrate on one particular dimension of the security state that has been underscored by the recent wave of revolt: its role in disciplining Tunisia’s ‘surplus population’, part of what Marx referred to as the global reserve army of labor. Using conjunctural analysis, the paper will focus in particular on the period following the 2010-2011 revolt, examining how two “crises”- the “war on terror” and covid-19- were mobilized to rearticulate and re-valorize the security apparatuses at critical moments in time when their colonial function had been exposed, enabling the increased policing and surveillance of poor and working-class Tunisians. Connected, it will examine how these conjunctures enabled Tunisia’s increased incorporation within a US-dominated imperialist security architecture, focusing on various strategies, including police, prison, and other “security sector reform” programs, border militarization, and joint military trainings. Yet despite this increased bolstering of the security state, as with past “security” conjunctures, when the state’s organized violence is exaggerated it is also demystified, therefore increasing vulnerability to contestation. This paper will therefore conclude by examining the spread and growing strength of revolt, focusing in particular on abolitionist tendencies within popular modes of organizing.